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Recent disruptions have come at a breakneck pace, leaving HR and business leaders to grapple with multi-pronged challenges.
Consider these. Getting on top of the social and cultural changes that are transforming both the workplace and the workforce. Navigating a volatile economic situation. Understanding the impact of technology on business and its potential influence on jobs. Adjusting to a new generation of workers entering the workforce. Planning for Industry 4.0’s promised blending of the physical, digital and biological worlds. Phew!
It’s all a bit like learning how to juggle and walk the tightrope — at the same time.
Steering through it all effectively requires a massive upskilling effort across all levels of the business. A 2021 World Economic Forum report found that over half of all employees worldwide will need to reskill or upskill by 2025. For senior executives, who are at the very forefront of leading their teams into the wild unknowns, upskilling has become mission-critical.
But guess what? Disruption hasn’t spared learning either. Thanks to the urgency for upskilling, the traditional domain of formal and structured L&D is going in some interesting new directions. L&D teams and business leaders alike must accept that upskilling — learning new skills to be able to do one’s job more effectively — in today’s environment is not going to be as straightforward as investing in some new-fangled learning management system (LMS).
So, what can help leaders upskill and be more effective at a time of disruption? Let’s take a closer look.
Learning to Learn Is a Priority
Figuring out the skills that will be needed tomorrow is a challenge in itself. For instance, even though we’ve known AI has been coming for years now, it wasn't until ChatGPT was released in 2023 that the ability to use generative AI in our work became an overnight must-have skill.
In the same vein, technical skills learned today may be obsolete by tomorrow. Skill gaps are widening, and the nature of roles is changing faster than we can roll out the job descriptions. And the disruptions aren't stopping any time soon.
In this environment, leaders need to do more than learn a specific skill. They need to up their ‘learning to learn’ skills, said Coreyne Woodman-Holoubek, founder of Progressive HR and a LinkedIn Top Voice in HR. Executives need the mindset and skill set to learn anything quickly, effectively and actionably, even in times of disruption — especially in times of disruption, she added.
Arie de Geus, author of “The Living Company” and guru of organizational learning, championed the need for human capital management with his breakthrough insight: "The ability to learn faster than your competitors may be the only sustainable competitive advantage.”
Although he wrote this decades ago, it rings truer today than ever, as executive leaders find themselves at sea with massive social changes and a myriad of technological advancements.
In a world where change is constant, upskilling needs to be constant, too. Leaders can’t wait for a disruption before starting to learn the things that will get them through it. Two things become critical in this scenario. First, the ability to read the trends and identify what's coming. Second, the skills to act on these insights effectively and proactively.
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Active, Continuous Learning Is Now Front and Center
In her HBR classic “Learning to Learn,” Erica Andersen described leaders who are also good learners as leaders who “push themselves to acquire radically different capabilities — while still performing their job.”
But the reality is executives are super busy. In addition, they are working in extremely disruptive environments, which stresses the need for both continuous and applied learning, said Shiv Gupta, founder of U of Digital, a digital marketing education company.
Gone are the days when executives had the ability to say they were too busy to learn or participated half-heartedly in one-off executive learning events. To be successful today, leaders have to learn to be active, lifelong learners.
This may sound counterintuitive, but while learning happens automatically all the time, effective learning requires a deliberate awareness of and focus on the process of learning.
For leaders, this means a well-designed process of identifying potential areas of disruption (learning), testing theories about that new idea in simulated scenarios (doing and practicing), evaluating what worked and what didn’t (reflecting) and taking calculated risks to activate real changes across the organizations (decision-making).
Resetting the Bar for 'Must-Have' Skills
A 2021 Citrix study found 82% of employees and 62% of HR directors said they believe workers will need to reskill or upskill at least once a year to maintain a competitive advantage in a global job market.
But for leaders, the definition of must-have skills is evolving. If learning to learn is the meta-skill, then comfort with uncertainty, taking calculated risks, the ability to “fail forward” and being a confident decision-maker in highly unpredictable environments are evidence of this skill, said Woodman-Holoubek. Skills like creative and collaborative problem-solving, design thinking and critical reasoning are also gaining ground.
The challenge for leadership is that these skills cannot be taught in a classroom. They must be actively practiced to be learned and internalized, so that when the inevitable disruption comes, leaders are ready to take action, not classes.
“We're seeing a greater appetite for multimodal learning. Leaders want to engage with learning content in different ways: live, self-paced, video, audio, etc. They don't want to go through hours and hours of learning at once; they want to be able to split up content over time, learn through bite-sized touchpoints and put what they learn into practice,” said Gupta.
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Woodman-Holoubek agreed. “Progressive leaders know that active learning is key to success in a disruption. Every CHRO I speak to right now is in the process of finding the best way to enable this culture of active, continuous learning in a more structured way,”
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Tapping Into Diverse Learning Sources
While bite-sized micro-learning modules that can be applied in small incremental doses are already popular, executives need more than theory or technical skills. They need vision.
For example, low-code and no-code tools are changing the dynamics and possibilities of what functional teams can achieve by themselves, without relying on expensive IT resources. For leadership, having an early and long-term vision of how this may impact the cost of human capital, business agility or the new skills mid and senior managers require will give them time to experiment, play out scenarios and deliberately work toward creating a competitive advantage over others, who may have only a passing awareness of the trend.
Learning from innovators, said Woodman-Holoubek, is a great way for leaders to identify trends that have the potential to impact business in unpredictable ways. “All the CHROs I talk to are reaching out to the expert innovators,” she said, noting it could be the big innovators such as Accenture, Cognizant, BCG, Pearson, Deloitte and PWC, but also the smaller, more agile innovators in the creator economy who are at the cutting edge of their subject. “HR is finding SMEs in areas they see as skill or knowledge gaps for executive leadership, and asking those SMEs to talk to their leaders.”
Encouraging the “internal creator economy” is another play that works, she observed. So much expertise is already within the system that often gets lost in functional silos or overlooked in a disruption. For instance, CEOs have direct access to employees who actively trade in crypto or Gen Z employees who are native to NFTs. She suggests leaders dig deep to find the right internal SMEs who can not only share expertise quickly but also bring in the context of the organization. “All that tribal knowledge can make it very powerful.”
Learning to Experiment, Fail and Innovate
Being active learners means leaders are already experimenting with scenarios and activating strategies and tactics around potentially disruptive trends.
For instance, leaders can set up cross-team projects for simulated projects and actively participate in the scenario-planning and decision-making needed in unfamiliar contexts. They can work with different SMEs within the organization as reverse mentors, who can give them a reality check and diverse perspectives on what works.
“Coming out of their comfort zone to put learnings into practice — immediately and consistently — is key to being a better learner and upskilling to deal more effectively with disruption,” said Woodman-Holoubek.
According to a McKinsey survey, almost every CEO said they would need to change their business model in the next three years, and nearly half said they are changing their business models today. Putting emergent ideas into practice for an anticipated future provides a low-stakes environment to experiment, fail and innovate, and that is exactly the culture of learning that helps organizations be better prepared to deal with disruption.
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The Future of Executive Upskilling in an Uncertain World
In today’s disruptive times, many leaders aren’t thinking about long-term future skills; they are thinking about survival. About getting from Point A to B in the most efficient way. It can be difficult to motivate people to learn when there is no urgent or immediate need, Woodman-Holoubek said. When the need becomes urgent, however, executives tend to have knee-jerk reactions, like what we are seeing happen right now with learning use cases for ChatGPT.
These recent disruptions have taught us that when it comes to upskilling, the business needs a long-term approach to executive upskilling, as well as the agility to fill urgent skill gaps to address the disruption effectively.
This is where HR needs to step in, to change the internal mindset toward upskilling — disruption or otherwise. Said Gupta, “If upskilling is viewed as a cost center, it usually won’t pay off. If it's seen as the path to business continuity and growth, it tends to be far more successful.”
